Photothermal flash light doping of strontium titanate photocatalyst nanoparticles

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Catal. Sci. Technol., 2026, Advance ArticleDOI: 10.1039/D5CY01501D, Paper Open Access &nbsp This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence.Melanie Johanning, Wanderson O. Silva, Anselm Dreher, Paul Kant, Mara Blöchlinger, A…

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Photothermal flash light doping of strontium titanate photocatalyst nanoparticles

* Corresponding authors

a Laboratory for Molecular Engineering of Optoelectronic Nanomaterials (LIMNO), Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering, EPFL, Lausanne CH-1015, Switzerland
E-mail: [email protected]

b Institute of Systems Engineering, HES-SO Valais-Wallis, Sion CH-1950, Switzerland

c Institute for Micro Process Engineering (IMVT), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), 76344 Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany

d Materials Engineering, Toyota Motor Europe, 1930 Zaventem, Belgium

Abstract

Rhodium and lanthanum co-doped strontium titanate (Rh,La:SrTiO3) is a promising material for green hydrogen (H2) production via heterogeneous photocatalytic (PC) water splitting. State-of-the-art Rh,La:SrTiO3 nanoparticle photocatalysts mitigate charge recombination using an undoped core/doped shell structure. However, the typically-employed synthesis methods use high temperatures >1000 °C in a slow dopant diffusion process, which induces inhomogeneities, causes nanoparticle sintering, and limits material performance. In this work, we demonstrate a rapid flash light annealing (FLA) technique that affords suitable nanoparticle doping in only 7.5 seconds. FLA samples show a PC performance three times greater than conventional thermal doping, which we attribute to mitigated particle sintering and dopants incorporated closer to the surface. Moreover, the H2 evolution rate under full spectrum simulated solar illumination increased by 50% compared to the undoped precursor nanoparticles. Finally, varying the flash parameters shows the tunability of the FLA process. The developed method paves the way for extending rapid doping by FLA to other powdered materials without the need for ion implantation.